It’s disappointing when a video game won’t be released outside of Japan. Not only because sales predictions for a certain region don’t look good, but because a company just doesn’t want to deal with the backlash and super negative publicity that will undoubtedly follow. For example, recently Tecmo Koei announced that Dead or AliveXtreme 3 wouldn’t be released in North America or Europe, then after a few days before saying that the game was released outside of Japan but it would be heavily altered. Which disappointed many fans.

So what’s exactly wrong with Dead or Alive Xtreme 3? It’s just too sexy. That’s really been one of the main draws of the entire franchise, and it’s been that way since the first Dead or Alive came out in 1996 in arcades and 1998 for the original Playstation system (because polygons can only be so sexy), and has grown into a full on franchise consisting of five main series titles released on multiple systems, and two Xbox exclusive spin-off titles focused on only the female fighters. The previous two Dead or Alive Xtreme featured a variety of mini games such as butt battles, volleyball and tug of war in their swimsuits, completely focused on their curves and heavily emphasizes how bouncy they can be, this of course led to both Xtrme games recieving an M-Rating on the ESRB. In reality the game is nothing but non-stop fan service and has never been a top seller, but it’s all in good fun, or at least it feels that way to gamers who enjoy it, others however boycott it for how it depicts women and trash it without even having ever played one of the games, nor commenting on it’s gameplay which Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 for the Xbox 360 averaged at rating of 5 out of 10.

One company decided to step in for the people who actually wanted to play the game, Hong Kong based video game import site Play-Asia sent out this tweet shortly after Tecmo Koei’s announcement:

Of course this was a smart move on the part of Play-Asia, if the game wasn’t going to be released in North America or Europe, what better way to get a few extra sales than let people know they could play the game in English using the Asia version, since the PlayStation 4 and Vita are region free. On the other hand, using SJW (Social Justice Warrior) hashtag got a lot of people angry including journalists, indie developers and a few others, who quickly decided to say they no longer planned on using their services in the future, even Kotaku writer, Luke Plunkett decided to reply to Play-Asia’s tweet which got a pretty amusing response:

It’s sad that Tecmo Koei gave in to the pressure of releasing the game in the West, and a pretty interesting day for Play-Asia who may have lost a few buyers but gained a ton of attention from potential new buyers who support them. If you are interested in Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, you can find Play-Asia’s pre-order here.

Do you think Play-Asia went a bit too far? Or did they stand up for the voiceless gamers who just want to sit back and have some fun watching girls in bikinis playing volleyball and tug of war in high-res graphics?